


Sine Labore Nihil

by cognomen



Series: Sine Labore Nihil [1]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-29
Updated: 2013-02-20
Packaged: 2017-11-11 00:26:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 15,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/472407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The information flows more slowly and gets more indecipherable as it becomes harder to find safe channels. Jack gets more and more frustrated with this game of penitentiary telephone, forced to take his own initiative more and more often. He wonders if it was ever any easier to get information to and from maximum security prison. Not for someone like Elias. They don't give his boss a television in his cell, even. Jack knows this because he ran an ad on the local public television channel for two weeks in code so simple a child could figure it out, his own decision, and not even a rebuke had come his way. He's flying solo, operating under a bond of trust only.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The information flows more slowly and gets more indecipherable as it becomes harder to find safe channels. Jack gets more and more frustrated with this game of penitentiary telephone, forced to take his own initiative more and more often. He wonders if it was ever any easier to get information to and from maximum security prison. Not for someone like Elias. They don't give his boss a television in his cell, even. Jack knows this because he ran an ad on the local public television channel for two weeks in code so simple a child could figure it out, his own decision, and not even a rebuke had come his way. He's flying solo, operating under a bond of trust only.

Even the _other guys_ had missed it, the hovering guardian angel wannabe with all the hardcore tech and his sharp eyed, lean and hungry attack dog. He'd never expected them to ignore the low-tech, but they had a blind spot for analog - which meant that it was definitely called shots, and the trained muscle _listened_. Because Jack knows his training might have been less classical - six years in the military hard and then ten more years in the quiet squads, and finally he'd worked the quietest of them all. Family - which was what that was always be about but then - then there were the _ideas_.

He knew it was dangerous to have them, because asking questions was dangerous too. People were so attached to status quo. Him, too, if he's honest with himself. And he was, to a fault. It was part of how he was so good at keeping quiet, his inner knowledge that words wouldn't matter too much, coming from him. Not until his actions had gotten him into position. He let Elias do the talking.

Jack does the _communicating_ instead. So he knows that his training included all manner of ways to accomplish that, and he knows how to interpret Morse code if it comes to that. He knows the man in a suit knows it too. So it's with a rising realization of how little internal initiative that John actually bothers to have that Jack understands that there is no subtle way to communicate with just him. It makes him mad, for some reason. He acknowledges that he wants to grab the man in a suit and tear him free, shake him until the muzzle falls off and he thinks for himself again, but he doesn't understand _why_ he wants that.

The man in a suit has his ears and eyes closed except to what his boss points him at. He's a seeing eye dog. Jack actually laughs a little at the thought, aloud. On the street.

People move out of his way, but he's used to that, even in NYC. He knows where he's going, passing giant screens without looking up, sliding through the people milling around tables and costumed entertainers. There's a police car parked on the median in Times Square, the officer is on the other side posing with tourists for pictures, like always. Jack audaciously reaches out to pass his fingers over the motto on its flank.

The city's changed - is always changing, he allows, passing a shop selling post cards and 9/11 tribute merchandise. Since he moved here and learned his way around, learned to be invisible even when hew as in a uniform, it's been changing. It rubs him the wrong way, what he's about to do - how visible he's about to become, but he's _tried_ everything else.

He stands at the statue of George M. Cohen, and first looks up at the resting people on the worn steps below the screens, then down at the pavement. There's a square in yellow paint, like a road marking, and he stands on it with his hands in his pockets and looks up. There's a pole, with cameras here, a whole series of them with official NYPD markings, but only one swings toward him as he remains in place.

He pulls off his hat and stares at it, oblivious to the people passing around him, until the stopwatch his free hand is curled around in his pocket shakes out the communication that five minutes have passed. He puts the ball cap back on - Yankees - and moves away into the crowd.

Ball's in their court. He doesn't move invisibly, lets the cameras keep him and keeps his path simple. He doesn't know how long he'll have to wait, how to tell if it even worked. If this doesn't, he's not sure what to try next. Jack makes it a point not to get ahead of himself. Instead he ducks into a Starbucks - comfortably anonymous - pays too much cash for a cup of coffee and settles in to wait.

He discovers he hates Starbucks coffee. Also, in the men's room, he finds - not the man in the suit, but he'd guess a cop. Maybe detective. Soft around the middle and with a cheap tie that to Jack suggested the man was a father. The sort of thing you'd only wear if you were under pressure from your younger, less understanding and more adoring family. He carried his weight easy, but Jack knows when he's being looked for. The detective eyes the scar by Jack's eye, and makes a face that suggests Jack is recognized. He's not sure from where.

"The hell?" New Yorker. Definitely. Jack arches his eyebrows wordlessly, washes his hands. Nobody has a conversation in the men's room, and he has even less desire to talk to the hired help. "They didn't tell me it was _you_ ," the detective accuses, but at least has the sense to lower his voice. 

Jack shakes his fingers out, notes that this is one of those forward thinking bathrooms that eliminates paper waste with air dryers. He pushes the button hard enough to show it he means business the first time and the detective' s protests are drowned under the rush of air.

If this idiot is too stupid to follow him out and talk outside, he's going to have a much lower opinion of the man in the suit and his boss. Maybe he does anyway, because the only reason the detective seems to follow Jack is because he's not done talking at him. The patrons stare at him - _them_ really, since Jack's quiet under the whole tirade, as they make their way out of the coffee shop. 

Jack holds the door for the detective, who doesn't even notice, because he's reached "...Give me one good reason why I shouldn't haul you in right now for impersonating an officer and obstructing the law."

Jack shows him his badge. Quickly, without fanfare. The detective shuts up, having no response to that.

"You really a cop?"

Jack suppresses the urge to grab this guy by the lapels and educate him on why it's a bad idea to ask stupid questions, instead he hooks his hand hard into the detective's elbow and yanks him around a corner, off the main street where hundreds of people are passing.

"What'd they ask you to do?" Jack says, sticking his hands in his pockets to be somewhere between non-threatening and terrifying.

" _They_ who?"

He looks at the detective frankly, and tries for a patient tone. "Man in a suit. Tall guy. Kneecaps bad guys. Saves the innocent. Batman, you know. And a shorter guy. Glasses. Stole a baby, once."

It's the most words Jack's strung together in a while. People spoke more if he was quiet, and they thought he wasn't smart. It served him, except when mouthy detectives took personal offense to actions he didn't remember.

"What the hell do _you_ care?" The detective asks, sounding aggravated. Out of the loop. "Last I checked you were in cahoots with the big bad guy." 

" _Cahoots_?" Jack isn't sure if he should be amused or annoyed by how simple this guy seems, how amiably backwater. He's... quaint. If one could be quaint and still live and work in New York City. "Detective, what did they ask you to do."

The detective frowns, shows all his emotions on his face and looks lost before he just fails to come up with a lie fast enough. "They told me to pick you up. Find out what you wanted. Only it wasn't _they_..."

Just one then? He's not sure which to expect - then he realizes it has to be the handler.

"I wanna talk to them," he answers, knowing that'll be the way to get just the man in the suit. John's boss won't expose himself like that, will limit his presence to just a device. 

"What? Well you got _me_. You can talk to me."

Jack takes the detective's wallet before the man can protest, spins his grab into a fall and kicks his shins out from under his overweight center of gravity.

"Hey, you son of a bitch!" Fusco - Detective, Jack was right - protests Jack's methods for introductions. Jack doubted the man in the suit was any politer. 

"Relax, Detective Fusco." Jack glances only far enough into the wallet to learn his address and see a picture of him and his kid before he drops it onto Fusco's chest and takes his foot off the man's middle. _Lionel,_ he thinks with a little amusement. It's an unusual name - doesn't quite suit him, but it settles on him in an odd way anyway. Permanent.

"Yeah, yeah," Fusco is getting up in a resigned way, an obedient way that suggests he's' been through this before and is used to eating his own pride for breakfast. "Now you know my name, do I get yours?" 

"No." Jack finds it best not to lie. "How'd you get tangled up in this anyway, Detective?"

"You hit me." Fusco bluffs - insistently though, so Jack knows it's true, even though it's not an explanation. "I haven't forgotten that."

Jack has. But _his_ face is a little harder to forget than Fusco's. "You want to try your luck at returning the favor?" He dares, putting his hands back in his pockets and watching expectantly . Fusco stares at him and realizes he's serious, that Jack would stand there and let himself be hit. Fusco also realizes what a bad idea it is.

"No," he says, angrily. Reluctantly, almost. Meaning 'yes' he wants to, but he knows better. 

"Tell them I'll be here again tomorrow, and I want to talk," Jack says, and steps off the curb, out of the alley. Loses himself in the mass and moves off camera, changes his hat, reverses his coat. Vanishes. He takes the roads with no cameras home, but expects company when he opens his front door anyway, draws his gun and feels disappointment when all that greets him is the angry yellow reflected light of his cat's eyes.

The cat doesn't have a name either, but he's trimmed neatly in black and white, as if he wore a dark suit over a white shirt with the top three buttons left undone.  
-


	2. Chapter 2

Jack knows the man in a suit's name is John. He knows because Elias had told him, and he knows the name is real, at least the first name, because that's the way you gain trust. He hasn't been _given_ the man's name yet, officially, though they've met. Exchanged death threats. Nothing personal - he learned not to take anything personal or _make_ anything personal early. It's why he's still alive and at the top, in combination with any number of other effective traits he's nurtured.

So having a name for someone he doesn't know, personally - a real first name - that makes this game a little strange. He's not sure exactly how personal he should take it when no one meets him the next day. He drinks his shitty, expensive coffee and considers the line cast anyway. The rest is patience - eventually they'll get curious or creatively desperate. Or they'll decide they need to know which one _he_ is. He can wait.

He's done drinking Starbucks coffee in the meantime. There's nothing in that $5 cup he can't get out of his own coffee maker. Jack's hardly poor anymore, but he likes living lean. Expensive made you soft. Made you forget to go places.

On his way out he notices the security camera turns away from the register to follow his exit and counts that as victory.

-

"I'm expecting your invitation to speak is still open?"

Jacks patience is finally rewarded nearly two months later, as he's watching the Yankees in his apartment. He has money tied up in the game, but when the ID on his cell phone had told him that it was delivering a 'blocked call', he'd muted the TV to answer it.

Opportunity didn't usually knock twice.

"I kinda get the feeling you want me to _listen_ ," Jack answers the voice - not the man in the suit. The man behind him. Finch.

"I'll be honest, you're not my _first_ choice of conversational partners, no."

"I was hoping to speak to someone a little lower in the food chain," Jack agrees, watching the score numbers only, so the game couldn't distract him. He doesn't want to dance around too much, give the guy too much opportunity to reconsider. "Something must have changed."

"I'll be frank. We _wouldn't_ be talking if I had any other option."

Bad news then. Jack finds it a little humorous, but keeps his peace. Waits. 

"Can we speak in person? You'll understand if I'm a bit _wary_ of cellular transmissions."

Jack doesn't like it. He'd trust John to follow the rules, but Finch doesn't even know the game. "With your track record of arrests, I'm 'a little wary' myself, Finch."

The conceding silence is short enough that it's not suspicious.

"Your choice where, then. I have your location, of course-" Finch implies he could have already done what Jack worries about, but he knows the bluff is only partial. He'd disabled the GPS in his cell phone a long time ago. "So I hope you'll pick someplace more accommodating."

"You like coffee?"

"Not particularly."

Jack brushes aside the thought that that would make Starbucks the _best_ place to meet. Finally his mind settles. It's New York, there's plenty of public places to meet that it'd be inadvisable for either side to make a scene at. 

"Well I don' t think we're at a stage where I feel comfortable asking you out for real drinks," Jack voices forth into the resounding silence, allowing his tone to turn honeyed with humor. John's boss really doesn't get out much. "Can you _find_ something acceptable to drink at Petrie Court?"

The coffee there is at least drinkable.

"Since drinks are hardly what matters," Finch begins, but there's a sort of relieved smile in his voice. Jack answers the assent in his tone without waiting for him to complete the sentence. 

"I'll see you there," he says. Central Park is neutral ground, outside both their usual territories. He pushes the issue. "I'm on my way."

"I'll be a little while."

"You got an hour. And no outside influences." Jack means Fusco, or any police for that matter. He doesn't give Finch long enough to construct a trap or have second thoughts, or _himself_ for that matter. Honestly, he's already thinking about it, but he doesn't want the hired help in on this, and he won't risk loyal guys or the way they gossip. 

Even if that'd be the quickest way to have a chat with the man in the suit, holding his Boss until he showed up.

"I'll see you within the hour, then," the voice answers, and the call terminates before Jack can voice that he doubts he'll _see_ Finch.  
-

The guy's not very tall, going for nondescript, but his suit was too nice, the coat looked like it had walked in off a tailor's mannequin - too close fitting and too clean to have come off a shop rack. He sits still and straight, with his eyes on the entrance in a posture of obvious expectancy. He doesn't want anyone else to think he's there to be social, risk looking unoccupied.

The Met's quiet this time of day, but there was always the chance. So his eyes, behind glasses, affix themselves to the glass door into the museum lobby and wait expectantly for Jack to come through it, oblivious to the fact that he's already sitting in one corner with a newspaper, and had been there nearly fifteen minutes before Finch had come in. He had watched the man come in and taken note of his order - green tea.

He looks vulnerable and exposed and Jack's instinct is to put a hand heavily on the man's shoulder as he passes, but he doesn't do it. He startles Finch with proximity instead - less directly threatening, he just passes with Finch on his right, taking his hat off to leave no question who he is before he drops into the chair opposite.

"I'm surprised to see _you_." Jack allows. He expected he would talk to John, to relate on the same level. He has no idea how he's supposed to deal with someone obviously in the next pay grade. 

Finch mops tea out of his lap and spares a withering glare in Jack's direction for the surprise that had caused him to jump mid-sip. It rolls off without so much as dent in Jack's armor. The man looks about as threatening as a small rodent. Maybe a chipmunk, like the kind his cat sometimes dragged in from god knows where in the city and left on the kitchen floor with it's innards exposed.

"Here I am," Finch says, and drops the wad of wet napkins on the table. "This is just as unusual and _unpleasant_ for me, I'm sure. " 

He reaches for a dry napkin - can't stand to have even slightly sticky fingers. Strange habit for a handler. Jack just waits.

"I'll be honest. I'm in a bit of a desperate situation - which I suppose you had gathered from my willingness to contact you at all. Now that you're somewhat more at liberty..."

Finch fishes for information with a trail in his voice, waiting for confirmation or denial. Jack gives him neither but implies with his silence. 

"...You might be able to help me."

_That's_ a surprise, even if that was the only place this could be going if it wasn't a trap. If it wasn't _still_ a trap. Jack's willing to stick his neck in the noose and find out. It beat waiting around.

"I was given to believe," Jack lets his city accent ride heavy on the words, 'work' words he thought of them. Business was always spoken properly in his background, but it didn't make him more than he was, the fact he could use the English language properly "That you already had all the help you could need in the sort of _capacity_ I have."

Finch's eyes change - when he realizes that Jack is likely educated. That his intelligence extends beyond an animal cunning and creative cruelty. He likes it when his patience plays out like that. Apparently Finch doesn't like underestimating others about as much as he doesn't like having sticky fingers or surprises that increase his dry cleaning bill.

"That's exactly the trouble," Finch says, his eyes are cold wells of determination, his back and neck rigid. He's swallowing a pill that he very much dislikes. "I can't get to him."

"You _lost_ him?" Jack asks, unable to stop his amusement. Even dogs got lost, he guessed. Or maybe John was just finally showing some of his own initiative, growing back into what he had been before (what Jack had seen in him the twice they'd fought), and Finch didn't like the feeling of his fingers slipping on the leash. 

"Not exactly... It's not a question of _finding_ him," Finch's sentence ends a little abruptly. The space is for a formal name, a parental chastisement, and Jack realizes that he _doesn't have the information_. He doesn't supply it. "It's a question of manpower."

"You can't get that from your pet detectives?" Jack arches his eyebrows.

"Not in the quality and quantity that I need - our - _friend,_ John," Finch stresses the word oddly. "He's on a few lists that mean I have to be careful of the sort of company he falls into. That includes rescue parties."

So what was so bad that Finch would risk Jack's help over that of the police? Or what was the opposing force? Jack won't get the information without signing on. He folds his hands together and rest the sides of his joined fists on the table, leaning forward.

"I was hoping you'd be a little more _reasonable_ to deal with than your - employer." Finch reminds him that he hasn't forgotten the last time they'd asked for help. "And seeing as you recently tried to contact us, I thought you might be interested."

Finch is putting the bone on the table now, but not throwing it like he would to a hungrier, less intelligent animal. He's adaptable. _Good_.

"I am," Jack doesn't beat around the bush - _or_ explain himself. He doesn't need to, doesn't have to _make_ Finch believe. He has the upper hand - _and_ it so happens a genuine desire to be of assistance. "Where is he?"

"You understand that I'd like this accomplished with a minimum of bloodshed?"

"But you're gonna leave it up to my discretion as to what a _minimum_ is, yeah?"

Finch doesn't like it, but he nods. He passes the folded napkin - he's been holding it in his hand the entire time - across the expanse of the table. He presses it flat to the surface of the laminate with two fingers on one edge and extends his arm all the way out until the opposite edge of the napkin touches Jack's folded hands. 

Jack makes no move to take it early, to see how far Finch will extend himself. Not far enough to risk _contact_. Smart - he looked like the sort who had been bit a few times, putting his hand out to strange animals.

"The CIA has him. This is the last location, and so far as I know they haven't moved him."

Jack closes his hand on the paper napkin, then makes a sudden motion as Finch begins to draw his hand back, lunging with just his hand. He traps Finch's hand against the tabletop.

"I'll get him back," Jack promises. Where he's from, you sealed those with contact. Skin on skin. He lets Finch go - the man had winced when Jack touched him, but not in _pain_ , exactly. He doesn't look at the address as he stands up, puts the napkin in his pocket tight against his thigh. "If you can make sure he's expecting me, it might make my job a little easier."

Jack moves around the table, getting ready to go - Finch is looking up at him like he never expected the answer he got. Like he's trapped himself in a box of his own desperation and lunged for a solution he's now not sure he wants. Too bad.

"Wait," Finch gathers himself enough to throw a question out as Jack is passing him by. "What do I call you?"

Finch _hates_ having to ask, both his hands now clenched in his lap on either side of the damp spot the spilled tea had left on his thighs.  
Jack chuckles. 

"I'm a stray, Finch. Call me whatever you want."

"I'll be paying attention, Mr. Stray," Finch warns, bitterly. " _Very_ close attention.

Jack lifts two fingers to his brow. Salutes. "Heard and understood, boss."

-


	3. Chapter 3

The building itself looks like little more than a run-down metal shed. Corrugated. From the top, waves of otherwise invisible heat flicker and flow. Jack suspects the temperature inside is as merciless as it gets.

On the second day of laying flat in the late August heat in upstate New York - not as bad as it could be, but lousy with humidity that makes sweating a futile effort - his backup exclaims into the binoculars. 

"What?" Jack asks, peeling his soaked shirt off the back of his neck to rake his nails over the sunburn there. 

"That guy," Chuck says, flattening closer to the dirt as if what he was looking at could see through their cover and pointing , jerking the binoculars into Jack's hands. "He's a real asshole."

Jack tries to follow the broad gesture through the massive magnification of the glasses. 

"Snow," Chuck clarifies, and yanks dizzyingly on the strap until the smirking face suddenly fills Jack's field of view. Jack adjusts back, takes in the posture while his companion reiterates.

"A real bastard. If _he's_ got your guy, we won't get the same one back."

Jack knows what built the man in the suit, and that he's more than the sum of his training. He doesn't' believe the reedy, cruel man he sees through his binoculars has enough creativity in him to break John's little finger, and he feels angry that the guy would even try.

"You _know_ that guy?" He asks instead, seeing messy complications in a recognition. It's not smooth.

"Yeah," Chuck says, and _starts_ to explain, but the first syllable is all Jack wanted.

"Go home," Jack says, and he doesn't have to raise his voice.

"You-" Chuck is torn between contradiction, disobeying, and being sure his superior is really asking what he thinks Jack is.

"Go home. If he's gonna recognize you, you're no help."

Chuck scrambles backwards through the rough grass and then down into the copse of trees where the cars are hidden. Jack doesn't hear the engine start, and is satisfied they'd parked far enough away. He doesn't bother to doubt his ability to do this alone now that he has to.

He just has to hit them harder and faster than they can react to. He has to take a lesson from the man in the suit.

Maybe the familiar technique will save him _from_ Reese when it gets down to it. Two months - if he really has been there that long - won't have broken John, but it'd leave him angry and their history might make him unreasonable. Jack would be both in the same situation.

He's waiting for nightfall when the steam train comes billowing up the rise, and he presses himself flatter to the ground. The chugging of breath, heavy lack of stealth, and low cursing at every inconvenience of nature alerts Jack to the name that ought to be stenciled on the locomotive - Lionel. 

He's lying so low and flat and still that Fusco steps heavily on his sleeve - almost his spread fingers, and Jack is glad he tucked the binoculars under his middle even if they dig in there. They're protected. Fusco is heading straight and upright for the lip of the rise. Jack would let him learn the hard way that standing exposed over a fortified position made you rifle practice, but if they shot him the CIA would come out to investigate his body and find signs of Jack's occupation.

Jack grabs the detective's ankle hard and hopes he won't yell too loud.

"Fuck!" Fusco barks instead - _some_ sense, then. Not too much because as he's turning he's appending - "Goddamn _snake_ out here-" and reaching down to clutch his ankle like he'd been struck by a diamondback.

He sits down when he sees Jack instead, and Jack gets the distinct impression Fusco would rather have seen the snake. Maybe that's a victory Jack should feel less keenly.

"Stick your head over that rise and they'll blow it off your neck for you," Jack says, keeping his voice low. "I know all that thinking is a nuisance for you, but there are cleaner ways detective."

"You gave me a fuckin' heart attack," Fusco says at length, getting his air back and his anger down. He's good at it.

"You'll make it - you want some CPR?" Jack condescends. "If you're gonna be here, lay the hell down and shut up - there's eight bored agents with guns down there."

Fusco settles heavily to the dirt in a less comfortable approximation of Jack's snipers flat. He looks both irritated and worried. Jack hands over the binoculars. "If you see a sniper scope through those, you'd better throw them aside and save the equipment at least."

"Can I ask you something?" Fusco finds the courage to ask as he frowns through the binoculars.

Jack doesn't say no.

"Why are you here?" Fusco asks, lifting his voice around the question. "I mean what does Elias - what do you gain by this?"

He revises the question hastily when he disengages from the binoculars to check on his progress with Jack and finds himself on uncertain ground.

Jack pulls his lower lip between his teeth to wet it and try and put an answer together that's more than the undefined philosophical concepts of 'family' and 'problems' and the tidiness to which he is inclined by nature.

"Where I'm from, if you don't solve your problems they become your responsibilities," Jack answers, wondering again if he should have just shot the guy. "I should have taken care of him while he was handcuffed to the boat, but-" Jack shrugs. The past is the past. "What about you, Lionel?"

Detective Fusco takes a moment to digest Jack's reaction, like a heavy meal he wasn't expecting. Maybe he'd thought Jack was incapable of having those kind of reasons, or that the answer would be overtly false. The detective surprises Jack in return. 

"I guess if you put it like that, I'm _his_ responsibility." Fusco answers, shaking his head and handing the binoculars back. "I'm not here because I'm a cop. I'm here because I wouldn't know what to do with my life anymore if that guy wasn't in it. And don't _you_ start with that first name crap."

Jack finds the sentiment unsettlingly easy to relate to.

"So we got a plan or are we just gonna sit here a while and work on our tans?" 

"We?" Jack asks the detective, amused that he's expected to trust the man just because he'd sad down next to Jack and had a heart to heart in a vague and undetailed way. The corner of his mouth pulls up and he puts the binoculars up to his face.

The irony is _they're_ supposed to trust _him_ with even less. "Is this Mr. Finch's idea of 'keeping an eye on me'?"

"Kinda," Fusco admits.

The sun is setting. The night guard increases the external guards by two, but by the same token decreases those inside. It neatly splits them into halves, two and two and one outside (sharpshooter on the roof, but with less elevation than Jack), and two and Snow inside. Jack has seen the sniper rotate once, but the new one came from off location, and the old had gone away in the same direction. It was getting down to the end of this one's 24 hour shift. There's no 'ideal' situation to be had here, but this is better than most. The shooter would be tired, the rest lax. 

"The plan is you go and get the car running and you have it in front of the door, hot, in 20 minutes." Jack tells him and tosses him the keys, then the binoculars. "And don't stick your head over that rise, go down on your belly."

Detective Fusco catches the binoculars after the keys bounce off his shoulder, and he has to grab for them in the dirt. Jack wonders if no help would be better than this, but figures with a little amusement a driver will make it easier to get away if the man in a suit finds a creative way to break Jack's hands.

"That's it? You don't want me to create a distraction or anything? Wave my pants around on a stick or get shot in the ass?" 

"Getting shot would be a pretty good distraction," Jack agrees, but lets that statement stay ambiguous as he slides off the rise and begins scrambling across the open scrubland between them and the building. 

He finds cover, checks his watch and makes sure the contents of his pockets are intact. Ski-mask, gloves, oil, gun. Finally he yanks off the BDUs that have kept him mostly hidden today and presses his hands over the suit he'd been wearing beneath, raking it into some semblance of order. It would pass, anyway. He approaches the building from the back with the mask in the inside pocket of his suit.

He pushes his hair back and strides, _belonging_. He lets it show that he has a reason to be here, and comes around the corner into the near patrol - or one of them. The faint smell of cigarette suggests where the other has gone.

"Hey, who the fuck are _you?_ "

"Replacement shooter," Jack says, and points up at the roof indicatively. That buys him a chance to show ID. He's not carrying a rifle, but it's not common to bring one on a rotating post - the rifle stays, the shooter changes.

"You're early," a voice says from behind him and to one side, and Jack glances around casually, seeing the other sentry is about halfway through his cigarette. He sounds calm, though.

"I can hold it longer," Jack answers, just as fast as he did when he was sick of hearing it when it pertained. And then he's inside. He doesn't like leaving them behind him, but this puts him fighting closer to his goal.

The building is hot as hell - there are fans that are supposed to move the air set high in the walls, but they sit still and the air is unquestionably stifling. 

Jack pulls in a thick lungful of the soupish air and he can _smell_ the human misery, the sour tang of sweat and the sweetish one of an old infection. The low, nauseating, peppery stench of unwashed body slowly cooking - as much torture for the agents as John, probably. 

As he pulls on his gloves he sees that there are only three doors and then to the left a tiny flight of four extremely steep stairs. He goes up these first, as much on his hands as the balls of his feet and then at the hatch onto the roof he digs in his pocket and comes up with some four-in-one oil which he liberally applies to the hatch hinges. 

The silent hatch, his low approach and then sudden arrow-straight spring onto the sniper's welcoming back all conspire to help him surprise his target. He first curls an arm around the man's neck, and then presses the carotid arteries before his yell progresses past a yelp. Then he takes charge of the rifle, propping the unconscious body of the CIA's shooter on the hatch to keep it closed.

The high powered, armor-piercing rounds aren't as kind to the kneecaps and thighs he puts them through as John's .45's, but probably aren't immediately fatal. And Jack doesn't intend to be here that long.

After the two guards outside are down, howling, and the men inside can hear his rifle discharging, two reinforcements emerge. Not as smart as they thought they were, but one ducks back up under the roof's overhang, safe as his partner drops uselessly to the ground. 

Someone starts banging on the hatch behind him, trying to dislodge the body. Jack discovers he dislikes the amount of shouting and noise that shooting to injure results in. He could have dropped them all soundlessly and without warning to the others inside but - well he'd kept his promise this far.

He yanks the ammunition clip out of the rifle and works the bolt to discharge the last round out of the chamber. These he tosses over the side of the building, before he slides the rifle itself into the far corner of the roof, empty and useless. He stomps down on the hatchway and yanks the ski mask out of his pocket, pulling it roughly over his head. 

With his weight added to that of the unconscious sniper's, Jack holds the hatch shut until his heart is beating slowly, until he's drawn three slow breaths. He's wishing for one of John's characteristic tear gas grenades and letting go of the notion as quickly as he'd had it.

On the third breath he reaches down, feeling the rhythm of the thuds against the hatch below him and then the pause while they reconsider. He seizes the sniper by the belt and the back of his shirt and unintentionally saves the man's life as two bullet holes open neatly in the metal hatch. He steps backwards and lets it open enough to admit the first half of a man through - and then drops his weight again, trapping him suddenly and neatly between the hatch and the ledge of the roof. He steps over the hatch itself at last and turning to face it kicks the dazed man back down the hatch, following him down with less caution and more bravado than he'd like. He's running out of time, and he still has to find John.

He has to duck hard back into the steep stairway when the two remaining men open fire from up the hall, two who have turned their handguns to full auto and Jack can practically taste the lead as it stings his arm and thuds past before he's back out of the way.

Not where he wants to be, but he salvages a gun from the agent at his feet and then hoists the man up as a shield. Not as much of one as he liked, but the others hesitate to shoot him long enough for Jack to cripple them - he still dislikes leaving them alive, at his back and able to surprise him later. With time what it is, he starts checking doors. Only the one at the end of the hall is locked, and his first kick is answered with shots.

_There's_ Snow. Chuck was right, he was a son of a bitch. Jack checks his watch and hopes that John is not in a direct line behind the door. He gets his own gun out from under the suit jacket, a compact SMG - a present from the Russians, not so much in good faith as under duress.

"I'm losing patience," he tells the door, standing to one side and raising his voice to be heard. "And I'm coming in there."

That should be enough warning for John. Silence answers. He kicks the door again, moves out of the way and this time when a volley answers he plants his feet, swings his arms out to aim parallel to his body and back along the line of direction from which the bullets had emerged, and lets loose in a straight, high line and trusts that John has good enough sense to be on the floor.

A noise answer and Jack kicks the battered door down without opposition this time. He might have killed snow. Jack doesn't care - the man lays in a heap that blood emerges from, and at this exact second he's still breathing. That's close enough to following orders. Jack kicks the gun out of Snow's hand and steps on the outstretched fingers for good measure.

For one moment of panic he thinks John isn't there, and then he sees that his suit has simply become the same filthy color of the floor, where he is sitting in one corner and blinking up at him. John's eyes seem unused to light. 

Outside the car horn sounds. Jack's late. 

"Can you walk?" he's moving forward, extending a hand down.

"I _will_." John says, in a hoarse whisper like his voice has worn out, and hoists himself with Jack's help.  
-


	4. Chapter 4

"Jesus," Fusco says, as if he doesn't believe what he's seeing when Jack gets Reese into the back of the car. "Is he-?"

"Drive, please, Lionel," John says, and he sounds exhausted. In the light he looks almost skeletal, his hair patchy and his skin yellow and sunk tight, snug on his bones. But he had _walked_ all the way out, leaning on Jack as little as possible out of pride. He was crushed, starved and filthy and scraped bare, but he was not _broken._

"Christ, okay." Fusco keeps it together enough to drive, and that's points in the guy's favor.

Jack wishes he had stayed long enough to put a few extra bullets in Snow. He's getting his breath back - sweat and blood cooling on his skin in different places - when bony fingers settle hard on the back of his neck and drag the mask and a half-handful of hair off his head and up over his face to blind him before John pins him against the door and takes Jack's gun.

Jack only resists enough to get the safety on, and then goes lax though every nerve screams against letting John have that much advantage of him. The gun muzzle presses a distinct pattern up under his chin.

"You can tell your boss I'm not interested in owing him any more favors," Reese says, and what hair isn't ripped out of the back of Jack's neck stands up.

"You okay?" Lionel asks - and then swears from the front seat, "Hey, what's-"

"Just drive," John growls, and the car doesn't slow down.

John smells awful, like neglect, like his body must be mostly shut down. He's still pressing Jack back with his diminished weight. He's still alive, so he's still fighting. Jack pushes his hands back against the window behind him, displaying his empty palms and feels the way John's muscles tremble and betray his weakness.

"You can tell him yourself," Jack says, feeling his throat move against the gun's muzzle, which does not. 

The phone's already going off - a silent buzzing in his pocket. "He's your boss, too." 

And maybe John is a little grateful for being rescued because he does not automatically assume the statement to mean Elias considers him bought. Instead he roughly recovers the cell phone from Jack's pocket, grinding the other contents (or maybe just the exposed bones in his fingertips, it's hard to identify with pain flaring up behind his covered eyes) mercilessly into the crease of his thigh and near enough to his crotch to make him wince and worry.

The hand has left the back of his neck and Jack moves - slowly - to get the mask the rest of the way off his head. If John's going to shoot him, Jack would rather see it coming.

John has the phone lifted to his ear, saying; "Harold."

The other end of the conversation is inaudible, but this close Jack _can_ hear that a voice - Mr. Finch - is answering John's. The tone is lifted, not quite hysterical.

"I'm not sure I approve of the help you brought in, Finch." John answers, interrupting the stream of noise from the other end. "We'd better not owe Elias..."

"It's just me," Jack cuts in.

John's eyes dart back to him, and the gun presses tighter under Jack's chin for a moment in warning. These people have some hellish trust issues. Jack waits patiently for them to sort a few out. Eventually the gun eases from under his chin, and John sits back, still listening to the explanation. 

"Hey I don't mean to uh, intrude, but your car's back there and I'm not sure if that matters," Fusco puts in. Jack sits up and rubs the back of his scalp.

"No," Jack says, because it's not entirely his car and the plates on it are false too. "Just get us back to the city. Maybe avoid freeways."

Fusco looks back at him reproachfully, as if he was a little sick of being treated like an idiot. Jack resists the urge to laugh, and shrugs it off before investigating the graze along his ribs and finds it bleeding but not serious. Just another scar.

"My place is downtown," Jack adds distantly. "Unless he's got one you know about or you want him at yours."

" _What_?" Fusco asks, like Jack's been speaking another language.

"Forget it. Aim for Manhattan, we'll figure it out from there." 

John is handing his phone back, and Jack almost hangs it up on Finch before he sees that the line is still connected and lifts it to his ear - Finch is already talking. 

"...made a bit of a mess back there, from the radio chatter, Mr. Stray. I won't insult your intelligence by asking if all of that was strictly _necessary_ \- but I suppose I should thank you for what you've accomplished." Finch sounds worried. He's still not sure this is over, but he wants very badly to not be the one at a disadvantage.

"I'm gonna give him back," Jack says into the brief silence where Finch hesitates, and he sees that he has John's attention, too. Sharp and unrelenting, refusing to let Jack quite forget the feeling of his own gun in the soft skin under his chin and the grip at the back of his neck. "So don't worry about it, boss."

Finch hesitates, almost audibly wincing back from the kindness of reassurance, uncertain about the terms of the arrangement but wanting to believe they will be honored.

"I'd - feel more comfortable if there was a monetary arrangement as recompense," Finch says at length, and John is still watching Jack. It takes him a minute - only that long - to realize the penetrating stare is a threat. That the man in the suit is watching him for any perceived wrong moves against Finch.

"I'll bet you would," Jack says. "But I'm not a mercenary. And I'm not a broken soldier you can fix up, either."

His tone stays level - no threat in it just - the truth. He's not short a purpose or direction, it just so happens that this is his way in, and it coincides with John's way out. "I appreciate the thanks, though."

What Finch can do for him, which is take care of John - in some ways his mirror and in some ways only a shadow, he's already going to do. If he asks for it, he'll only arouse suspicion. So Jack doesn't.

"Alright, then." Finch says, uncertainly. He hates the unfinished business he has to leave hanging, but knows better than to try and negotiate. "Thank you again, Mr. Stray."

The connection terminates. Jack gives the phone to Reese - if Finch had the number, he had everything in it anyway, which wasn't much. Jack still believes in face to face conversations. 

"How did you get involved?" John asks, closing his hand over the phone and putting it absently in his pocket like he did it every day with stranger's phones. He probably did.

"Your boss let his fingers do the walking," Jack says, because he owes this guy as many answers as this guy owes him. And Reese senses it isn't the whole truth, and the suggestive phrasing and tone gets his dander up which was what Jack intended, but Jack sees him hold the curiosity again. Sees him accept Finch's decision without any further questions, and Jack wants to shake him again. Now's not the right time.

"Pull over," is what John says instead, to Lionel. They're still nowhere near the city, nowhere near any place at all.

"We're not-" Fusco starts to protest over his shoulder, but he sees John means it and does what he's told.

Jack takes the hint and lets himself out. It'll be a walk, but John's mouth turns up, pale in his gaunt face, and he leans toward the window, tosses Jack back his gun and the magazine clip for it. 

"I'd have just shot you," John says, as Jack holds the magazine against his palm and starts to work the slide open to reload the gun. John says it to remind Jack that they're even, to suggest John doesn't owe him anything. Jack knows better - that the man in the suit doesn't work that way.

"Your boss has a soft spot for me," Jack answers, and shows his teeth in a half smile and half counting coup, because _there_ at least they are even. 

Then the car pulls away, taking its mismatched and damaged passengers with it, and leaving Jack to lick his wounds all the way home. It doesn't hurt his pride any.  
-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter moves into [(Non)Sequitur,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/511570) and chapter 5 will pick up after that interlude fic.


	5. Chapter 5

The phone wakes Jack up from a sound sleep, and he sits up from amorphous dreams of streets and lights so bright that he couldn't see the stars he was trying to find. He upsets the cat off his chest and crawls out of bed groggy with extra sleep. It's the antibiotics, they always wear him down.

The phone is charging in his sock drawer - it's the only way to keep the cat from sliding it onto the floor over and over during the night, and set to extra loud to compensate. Jack winces as he pulls his stitches, and checks the time on the front of the phone before he flips it open.

He doesn't remember when he went to sleep yet, so the early afternoon time frame is hard to put into context.

"Yeah?" he answers, tucking the phone between his ear and his shoulder and picking up his prescription bottle to shake a small pink pill out onto his palm. 

"Mr. Stray," Finch says on the other end, and Jack pauses with the pill cupped in his palm and some surprise.

"Yes, Mr. Finch?" He asks, keeping his cool, passing his thumb over the name on the pill bottle as he takes his med and swallows, the name still his possession.

"I have some information that I think you might like to have. And, a proposition for you, if you'd care to meet someone in person to receive it."

"You didn't lose him again already, did you?" Jack asks, because he hadn't expected this - not this soon.

"No, nothing like that," Finch says, his tone a little colder for the insinuation he might be so careless. "It's something you'll find _personally_ interesting, I assure you."

"Where can I meet you, Boss?" Jack asks, because he's not doing anything more interesting and John can't be well enough yet to try and trap him. Even if he was, they didn't play that way.

"I'll send someone to meet you at Washington Park. Take your phone with you."

So, not Finch himself then. Jack's interest is piqued because he's not sure why Finch would risk John again so soon.

It's not what he gets, though - his answer comes in the form of one extremely disgruntled police detective.

" _This_ fuckin' guy?" Fusco greets Jack sidelong into his cell phone where he is presumably speaking to Finch.

Jack smiles at him, and wider still into Fusco's leer, because as much as the detective still didn't like him, he wasn't making any sign of real protest. Fusco sighs, and tells the phone to fuck itself sideways before he hangs it up.

"For the record, I don't like this," Fusco says, jabbing a finger at Jack that suggest he means 'you' more than 'this'. Jack doesn't blame him. 

"I don't know why I'm here either, detective," Jack says, giving him an opening for the upper hand. In this situation it's a small, harmless concession.

"Really?" Fusco says, and then laughs viciously. "Have I got a nasty surprise for you, then."

Jack waits.

"I'm here to arrest you," Fusco says, laughing again. "And take you to jail."

It doesn't make a lot of sense, and Jack dislikes having parts of the story withheld - Fusco is trying to get a rise out of him. He's used to it - it's tough enough to do that others seem to see it as a challenge. Jack tucks his hands in his pockets and silently dares Fusco to try it, drawing himself up. Fusco's explanation might be part of it but it isn't everything - and Fusco takes in Jack's posture and wisely decides that explaining will be easier than forcing the situation. 

"Your boss is in danger," He says, sticking his own hands into his pockets. "He's coming out of solitary in a few days - good behavior I guess - and some guards are planning on making a move when they can foist blame off themselves."

Jack has gone tense and quiet. "HR told you this?"

"I got connections of my own," Detective Fusco says peevishly, trying to suggest he'd learned it from Reese and Finch, but Jack can read the implications of his defensiveness.

"So you're gonna - what? Put me in there?" Jack figures the plot out as soon as he finishes asking the questions and all his instincts set against it. "I want to save Elias so you'll throw me in to do it and let me rot after?"

It's neat. Like a chess move - a sacrifice that will save the king piece but cripple the game. Jack is honestly not sure what Elias would choose. Jack would rather be wrong and have Elias alive to tell him so.

"I want to talk to Finch first," Jack says, and Fusco makes a 'be my guest' motion, his upper lip pulled back from his teeth in a cattish grin that could be a snarl. Jack redials his last incoming call, and Finch answers promptly.

"I supposed you might have an objection," Finch says, faintly disappointed. 

"Questions," Jack corrects. "I do this and I get out again?"

"Well," Finch says, and the sounds of clicking keys fill his pause. "I suppose that all depends on how well you covered your tracks, Mr. Stray."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I was going to enter you into the system as a transfer - awaiting your appeal but considered a flight risk. Unless you'd prefer to go in 'on your own merits', shall we say?"

Jack laughs harshly into the phone. "There aren't any, legally. That's why I'm not in already."

" _Legally_ ," Finch says with some irritation, "I'm not sure you exist."

"Pots and kettles, Mr. Finch. I want your word you'll get me back out." 

"You do your half..." Finch says, trailing as he tastes his own words and finds he doesn't like the flavor. "And I'll do mine."

Jack closes the phone, turns it over to Fusco, and smirks at him for a moment to leave him guessing. Then he closes his hands and offers his wrists saying, "I'll need you to feed my cat."

"Yeah okay, ha ha," the detective says, bitterly, shoving the phone into his pocket. "'Cause you're a model pet owner."

"I mean it," Jack says, and Fusco rolls his eyes but nods anyway.

"You carrying?" Fusco asks, as he goes for his cuffs.

"What do you think?" Jack asks, feeling acutely trapped by the links of metal and the cold circles closing around his wrists - not because the cuffs could hold him if he had a mind not to let them, but because he has surrendered himself to them. It makes him edgy and irritable. 

"Okay Sunshine, _where_?" 

Jack tips his chin back and almost tells the detective to find the gun himself, before he lifts his cuffed hands and produces the gun from under his arm and hands it over. He doesn't miss the flinch - probably spending too much time around the man in the suit.

"So if we run ballistics on this?" Fusco asks, and Jack realizes he's asking if he should 'misplace evidence' to make things go smoother, as casually as that. Those two sure could pick friends.

"It's clean."

"Well it's your neck on the line," Fusco says, and pushes Jack's head down as he gets into the back of the cruiser like a real cop.


	6. Chapter 6

The whole process grates on his every nerve - he slips in in the middle of it, at least. Finch could have started him with giving up his real identity, forcing him to file real fingerprints. Instead, Finch finds a crack and Fusco slides him into it, with all the finesse of an old hand. All he sacrifices is his sidearm. It was reliable, an old favourite, but disposable like everything else in his life. Jack has learned that not existing means that possessions are as transitory as names.

He rides patiently in the back of the transport, but every turn, every jounce pulls his nerves until he's wound up almost tight enough to snap. the guards look distrustful, and Jack feels the same. He looks rough, and right now he _feels_ it, abrasive and short fused. He's impatient, Elias only has a day or so left before he works his way through the system and out of solitary - and Jack has no damn clue if he'll even be close enough to stop whatever's about to happen from happening. 

He almost starts something without thinking about it as the guards yank roughly at his wrists, pulling the long chain like he was an obstinate dog (and he _is_ , but he's not _theirs_ ) when he is choosy about getting down into the yard. The yank is to take him off balance, force him to stumble out of the truck so the guard has the upper hand from the instant he belongs to the walls and chain-link pens. Jack refuses to cede, puts his foot down hard on the truck bed and yanks back in a steady pressure that threatens the small bones in his wrists, and looks down at the guard while the hollow-metal sound echoes out across the yard.

"Get down here, asshole," the guard snaps. His name tag reads 'Kolitz', and Jack curls his hand around the taut chain between them to keep his end as slack as he wants it and steps down with no further surprises.

Kolitz doesn't like it - Jack knows the exact sensation, but there are eyes on them now and Jack subsides into obedience so Kolitz has no excuses. It'll come back around, and he has his first inkling of what he's really entering. It wakes him up. Reminds him to focus, or he'll lose his advantage. He doesn't have much of one.

He forces his steps not to slow as they lead him, forces his eyes forward to keep from looking at the other animals in cages as they go by. He has no idea how permanent this is, so he can barely reassure himself with _that_ , either.

The cells are cement on three sides and bars on the last. It reminds him of the pound, smells like an old inner-city gym or pool. Like piss covered up under bleach, and you're never sure which you'd rather smell, just that somehow the combination is worse than either would be alone.

It almost doesn't become fully real until they stop, until he sees that the space he's about to occupy _is_ already and his heart gives a jump thinking maybe somehow Finch had pulled enough strings - but the shape is all wrong for Elias. Taller, thinner. The slope of shoulder and short-shaved hair don't strike Jack as familiar, and that's all he can see as he steps in. The door rattles along its track and locks into place behind him.

While he's standing, taking in the space, how small it is even for _one_ let alone two, Kolitz jabs him in the kidney with his baton. It's as unexpected as it is unnecessary and Jack almost loses his balance, knocked forward a step by the force of the jab and he wheels around on that momentum to grab the bars. It serves both to steady him and intimidate his antagonist, who has moved wisely beyond arm's reach.

"Keep the cuffs on then, asshole," Kolitz grins, and Jack has to draw his hands back quickly to avoid the halfhearted flick the guard gives toward them with his baton. "See how you feel after a couple hours with _him_."

And he leaves, assuming the cuffs mean Jack is helpless - Kolitz should already know better. Jack touches his side experimentally, checking his stitches and finding them intact. Tender, still too hot, but not bleeding at least. He remembers vaguely that quitting antibiotics halfway through is unwise, but he'd hardly had time to pack a bag.

The other prisoner is still curled on the bed - the top one, the one with more escape opportunities. He hasn't so much as looked up at Jack, and Jack returns the favor as he settles down on the edge of the lower bunk and tries to redefine his space to four walls, restricted hands, and a cell mate. 

"The guard's a peach isn't he?" The soft voice is instantly recognizable, and Jack doesn't _quite_ startle, though he knows that had been John's intent. "And he's not one of the guys we're looking out for."

Of course Jack hadn't recognized the other prisoner as John - his hair was nearly shaved off and he'd been too thin; of _course_ \- he was barely two weeks out of CIA custody.

Jack looks up at the camera in the corner of the cell, surprised at Finch's move. Why send Jack if his own man was coming? Why send John if it was a trap?

"Didn't you just get _out_ of trouble?" Jack asks instead, keeping his surprise mostly to himself. "Some thanks it is to get back into it so quick. Your boss doesn't trust me still?"

"I don't."

That's genuinely surprising. Jack's not quite sure how to take it, but he thinks John is admitting -

"My boss has nothing to do with it," John confirms, only briefly admitting - through a confidence and never outright stating - that they're in this together and that _might_ be all they've got. 

Jack could laugh. He doesn't, but he smiles where he can't be seen.

"Now you're thinking for yourself," he says, his tone like the kind you'd use to praise a dog. "I thought maybe you'd given that up."

John makes a noise - not an angry one like Jack had intended to provoke, but a curious half-humorous sound.

"I thought the same about you," John says, as if it's easier to tell the truth when they don't have to look at each other. He chuckles. "But I'm betting your boss doesn't know you're here, either." 

Jack has to concede his point. He leans back and lets the silence answer for him, an affirmative. John shifts above him, and the mattress dips on the cheap suspension, brushing the top of Jack's head. It reinforces how close the space is - how close _they_ are. They've never shared this little space without violence being involved. 

"You have a plan?" Jack asks, because the shift in position has turned John to face the cell door - they're both looking out of it, both feeling the slow spider-leg crawl of confinement up their spines, and it fosters them together, puts them on even ground even while it threatens to yank their balance out from under them.

"We..." John draws the word out, as if he's not used to the taste of it, but lets it drift on his breath softly, like he finds he doesn't object. "Wait."


	7. Chapter 7

It isn't easy. The cell is close, crowded when both of them move in it. Neither deals with the confinement well. Kolitz eventually returns to take the cuffs off. By that time Jack is pacing the bars because he feels confined and at the same time he's closer to Elias than he has been in _months_.

He's also as far as he's ever been, and he knows that time - well, he knows he doesn't have it. Jack wants to tear down the walls with his bare hands and get them _out_ of this place - but almost as much he just wants to be in the same room as Elias again. It's something he hadn't realized, how much the time apart had affected him. The time apart seems to pile up in Jack's mind, stretching out in a way that makes him feel restless and dangerous. 

John doesn't visibly display his anxiety, but he likes the place as little as Jack does.

It's not much of a day. Jack takes an uncomfortable leak in the toilet, knowing John is aware of his every move, aware that it makes him tense to feel so under scrutiny. He pisses in fits and starts, agitated, and berates himself for letting it get worse.

Then it's lights-out. They don't get an option. At 9pm electricity shuts off to everything but the caged overhead light, which isn't quite enough to read by, but enough to nag at him. Jack finds himself conscious of the color of his eyelids and a desire to either hit something or break something - _anything_ to let the tension out. 

John shifts restlessly.

"Why didn't you take Elias up on his offer?" Jack asks - because he knows neither of them are going to sleep - not penned in like this - and because he knows the answer will be interesting. John holds no notions of his own virtue - instead he places them into Finch's hands. 

"Because he only thought I was worth something after my friend found me and made me worth something," John answers. "Elias is interested in tools, not potentials."

"I think you have more-" Jack starts, and realizes he's been dealt an underhanded slight, that he's about to walk neatly into a sort of verbal mouse trap. "I think you hold yourself back for him."

"I wonder if you couldn't be more than what you are either," John's voice comes down through the half-dark and Jack looks up at his shape in the shitty mattress, the dips and curves of him.

"Look," Jack says, provoked. He started it, he realizes, but he hardly wants to go down memory lane with what amounts to his worst enemy - or would, if he thought in absolutes and held grudges. "I don't know where you came from, and you don't know where I came from."

"And neither of us knows where we're going without the people that pulled us out of the garbage," John says. "The difference is-"

"Not as much as you want to believe," Jack answers, laughing, folding his hands over his ribs with his fingers locked together. "We're both here, aren't we?"

John goes quiet, angry, because Jack and he had recognized each other almost the instant they'd met, it had been a little like looking in a mirror and just changing the angle ever so slightly.

"It's just who we work for," Jack says, enjoying the feeling of stabbing into the darkness, of not sugar coating any of it. "You could be me and I could be you and you know it. You can see it, can't you?"

And John doesn't even try to argue that he wouldn't work for Elias, or that he couldn't have been pulled up from whatever hell he'd shoved himself in any other way. 

"I think why we work for our bosses might be-" John starts, but halfway through he stops, puts together his own evidence and after a time of quiet says irritatedly, "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised."

"I wasn't," Jack says. Reese shifts.

"You're really talkative when you're tense," Reese says, closing up and lashing out. Not too surprising. They'd both pretty much just admitted to having the hots for their superiors - in Jack's case, more. Probably Reese, too.

"Fuck you," Jack says, and rolls over onto his side, yanks the blanket over his head so he can block the light and possibly sleep. He feels John shift, but doesn't' realize he's climbed off the top bunk until his own mattress dips suddenly under John's added weight. 

Jack tenses up, ready for this fight, even though he hadn't truly anticipated it. The hand that closes over the back of his neck isn't violent but steadying. It makes his scalp ache a little in memory, but this time John does not pull his hair out, instead he just holds, with no hint of delicacy.

Jack doesn't want to relax, but after a moment of steady pressure just shy of pain, he does. What's the harm? John is not Elias, but they're both in so tense a frame of mind that the contact, even in substitution, helps.

For a moment it's just awkward elbows and wordless shifting. Jack kicks John in the knee and wonders how someone so tall even wedges themselves onto the prison bed. It's not so different from a military cot, Jack thinks, but he's never been tall enough to find fault.

John presses Jack between himself and the wall to get enough space to bend his knees and it _should_ make things worse, cause Jack to feel entrapped, but it doesn't. John yanks the edge of the blanket until he gets enough of it to be covered, and then they settle and it's easy, somehow.

"This just for my benefit?" Jack asks, because he has to know - because he refuses to let this be a sacrifice on John's part. 

"I haven't touched anyone in months," John answers evasively. Jack feels John's chest expand against his back as he draws in a breath.

Jack hasn't either, but that's not the point he touches on - Reese was, or had been, safely back in Finch's care. Maybe hew as a little worn down, a little rough and sick, but that was no reason not to at least comfort each other.

"He don't know, huh?" Jack says, because it somehow makes John human for Jack to know that. 

John doesn't answer except with a warning squeeze - his hands had settled under Jack's arms, around his sides, and he pushes his curled fists under Jack's ribs threateningly.

"Does Elias?" John asks, roughly - and he _wants_ to know, wants to see where his footing is, so Jack doesn't answer either just turns his hands over John's and digs his thumbs into the hollows of John's wrists until he's sure it hurts.

Teeth sink into the back of his neck and it's not the reaction he'd expected - but it'll do. He's hyper-aware all of a sudden, of how open the cell is to the hall, the camera, how the blanket will only leave a little to the imagination, and also of the exact locations of John's incisors on his spine.

He thinks John wants Jack to tell him to stop, to find out if he has enough of a secret for leverage, but the joke's on him. Jack calls his bluff, curls his body,a nd reaches back through his own legs and palms John's crotch - expecting a yell or to be stopped and put forcibly in his place, or for John to just get up, move away, and they can go back to being separately miserable.

Instead he's fascinated to find that John is hard, that the further clamp of teeth on his neck isn't entirely disapproving.

"This for me or somebody else?" Jack asks - he doesn't _care_ , so long as guilt won't stop John somewhere in the middle.

John breathes wetly against Jack's neck and that's all the answer Jack's _body_ needs, but Reese unclamps his teeth and asks, in a rough tone that's even worse for Jack's control, "does it matter?"

No, Jack decides, it does _not_.

The thin jumpsuit material - orange, plain cotton - doesn't hide much. Jack curls his fingers over it, around John's dick and it hardens the rest of the way, filling his fist impressively. He thinks maybe under other circumstances - but there aren't any. 

"Must be tough," John says, antagonizing, an undertone of voice that's not quite conversational enough to cover what he's feeling. "Keeping this from the other mob boys."

Jack turns his hand and yanks the button fly on the jumpsuit open, insinuates his fingers and squeezes.

"That how you fell in with Elias?" John is asking, and then he groans, just barely, on the verge of silence. Jack feels it more than he hears it.

Close, but not the whole story.

"You're talkative when you're turned on," Jack answers, with humor, and John finally moves his hands from beneath Jack's ribs. "Interrogations usually work better when you're the one doing the distracting."

Reese apparently agrees, and there's a tangle of hands for a moment, John's trying to negotiate around Jack's forearm for access before he shoves his knee through Jack's thighs and they have to renegotiate for control, for position. 

"Bad habit," John agrees, talking more to himself.

It would be easier if they were facing each other but they don't. John twists his hips and slides his thigh along until his knee hits the wall and Jack presses down against it and lifts his own hand out of the way, over John's arm, and then they can both reach.

Jack pushes against John's cupped palms and shifts his weight, feeling pinned, feeling John's teeth against the side of his neck behind his ear, and he shoves his hand back into the coveralls and grips John's erection, skin on skin. 

John pushes up into it, and palms Jack's length down, pressing it between his palm and his thigh, and Jack has to quiet himself. They aren't as alone as they've convinced themselves.

He wonders if Finch is watching, wonders what the man is thinking if he is, wonders just as he curls his fist tighter to encourage John along on getting his fingers into Jack's underwear, if that's part of the point.

Reese's hands are a lot like his own, he notices, as John holds the fly open and draws his erection free. Calloused on the web of his thumb from recoil, on the heel of his hand from the grip, the side of his palm. John presses his trigger finger up under the head of Jack's dick and rubs, with just the barest hint of short, square nails, and except for the length of his fingers, Jack could be touching himself.

"That narcissism?" he gasps, and John bites him to shut him up, lets Jack push forward almost wildly, along John's thigh.

With all the tension, that's enough, it's rushed, imperfect, less than Jack wants, but he's coming into John's hand and along his leg and probably all over the wall and chuckling low in his chest because it's funny in a dire way and nothing has appealed to Jack's sense of humor like this in a long time. He keeps pushing in shallow thrusts until the friction starts to hurt, until that pulls him back from seeing stars.

He knows in a moment he'll feel languid, boneless. He also knows he'll have lost his opportunity so he refuses to surrender.

Jack breaks the rules - he always has, he's always been a pusher, so he turns before John can protest, keeps his hand in place and shifts down, pulls the blanket with him. John doesn't' want this face to face, but Jack pushes that boundary, stretches it wide like he does his mouth when he closes it over the head of John's cock.

Fingers curl roughly in Jack's hair, but never progress past encouraging. It's not the easiest position, one of Jack's knees slides off the edge of the mattress and he just braces his foot on the floor instead. John's almost got as big a dick as he acts like he has, so Jack abandons any stupid notions and just curls his fist around the base of John's cock and keeps his mouth on the important part.

John isn't quite growling or whimpering, but he's breathing faster, sub-vocalizing on the ends of his exhales like he's fucking _ready_ , and Jack realizes this is probably the closest he'll really ever get to having a true upper hand. In any other circumstance it'd be hilarious - right now it's such a fucking turn on that he actually slows down, takes his time. John muffles himself on his own skin, lifting a hand from Jack's head to set his teeth into the side of his palm, and Jack accepts the challenge, drawing back and following his mouth with his slick fist. He pushes the tip of his tongue into the slit at the head of John's glans before he turns his mouth, wide and wet along the underside of John's length and sucks hard.

It gets him a noise, an arch of John's hips and barely enough warning to get out of the way before he winds up with cum in his eye or something. The air under the blanket is hot and hard to breathe so he half slides out from under it, letting the mess stripe the fabric. He continues stroking as he eases back up onto the bed, slowing, but not relenting until John pushes his hands away.

Jack can't think of anything to say, so he just asks instead, "You think your boss was watching?" He doesn't miss the way John's breath catches before John moves, balling the blanket up in his fist to fling it at Jack's amused expression.

It's wet and cooling where it hits him, and he laughs hard enough that a neighboring inmate tells him to shut the fuck up.


	8. Chapter 8

John lances through the silence as he stares at the television. "You aren't used to this? I'm surprised."

If it's supposed to piss Jack off, it fails. He leans against the bars to feel some semblance of open air at his back and wonders what John is trying to get at.

"If you couldn't catch me, who else do you think would have?" Jack asks, and he sees with some amusement that the TV screen is blue - John is watching public access. 

"I wondered if there were any mistakes you might have learned from," John answers distantly 

"How about you? This seems pretty old-hat," Jack pushes back, because there's not exactly anything else to do. "You been in?" 

"Never for real," John answers, watching the screen and allowing his tone to go vague and suggestive.

"Let's just hope this isn't 'for real' either," Jack answers, glancing at the TV and watches a familiar ad scroll past, surprised to see it still airing - 

LOST DOG  
Shepherd Mix  
"Answers to John"  
Missing since 11/11

"That's a long time to hold out hope for a missing animal," John says, faintly amused.

"Must be a really good dog," Jack agrees, knowing the ad is a duplicate of his earlier one - he'd only paid for it to run two weeks. Seems like they _had_ noticed, after all. 

"Or a really lonely person."

Jack refuses to be provoked, wills the screen to move on to the next message.

STRAY FOUND  
Turned into local shelter.  
For information call 555-3700  
after 4/16

"That's tomorrow," Jack says, and then drags his eyes back up to the phone number. "Is that a go ahead or a wait?"

"That's a phone number," John says, with a gentle sarcasm. He touches his ear, and for the first time Jack notices the tiny device situated behind it, the clear tube running into the ear canal. 

Jack admires the ingenuity behind falsifying John's records to include a disability. Technically the bluetooth earpiece should require a phone paired with it, but likely they're piggybacking any available device. They aren't quite as alone as Jack thought.

"Finch," John says, after a moment and his eyes focus upward, visualizing. "No I don't know how many other calls you've gotten," John says, his voice even, soft. "Does it really matter?"

The other end of the conversation is silent, not even the usual punctuated syllables of a cell phone, and Jack tunes John's voice out so he can play lookout, leaning into the bars and looking out into the pristine white hall, the green floor tile. It smells like antiseptic. Jack misses fresh air, and perversely, cigarettes. 

He hangs his hands through the bars and watches - a half dozen other guy s are in the same pose, looking bored and broken down, hoping for anything to break up the monotony. As a punishment, surely this works. He wonders how Elias has endured it. Jack's pretty sure by now he'd have strung his shoelaces together and hung himself. 

Kolitz rounds the corner up the hall and Jack is suddenly wary of the soft muttering conversation going on behind him as John relays information. And the guard hasn't forgotten Jack, either. He alters h is course threateningly, hand on his baton. Likes to wave that thing around, in Jack's opinion. 

"You ever gonna let us out?" Jack taunts, shifts his position to direct his attention clearly toward Kolitz, so John knows something is coming and from where. The quiet conversation behind him ceases.

"Your lucky day asshole," Kolitz answers, looking malicious, but Jack notices that as he approaches he's careful to pay attention to where John's at in the cell, too. Maybe that's personal, Jack hopes so anyway. "Put your hands through the slot."

Jack doesn't like it - the rest of the cell block is attentive, watching. None of them have guards approaching to take them outside or even make preparations. 

He glances back at John who gives no sign. Well there's only so much he can lose, and he's not afraid of the risk. Jack offers his hands to let Kolitz close the cuffs on his wrists. 

"Nice knowing you, shorty." One of the other inmates taunts. "Have fun with the toughs on the quad."

"Oh is _that_ all." He backs up from the door, making eye contact. Kolitz is watching him, waiting for Jack to spook at the information, so Jack doesn't. 

They leave John behind, and Jack wouldn't have imagined before this that there was a situation where he'd rather have the man in the suit at his back, but this is it.

It's sunny outside, leaving long chain-link shadows and for a moment the light makes Jack squint against it - the high flourescents in the prison are hardly any match. Then he's outside in the yard - and he turns around to put his hands back through the slot in the door absently, hoping - maybe foolishly - to see Elias. His eyes are scanning back and forth, taking in the area when there's a hard yank on his wrists through the slot and he grunts involuntarily and pulls back on instinct. He's too late and there's no give - Kolitz has looped another length of chain through the connecting piece of his cuffs, and tied him there with his hands stuck to the elbows in the handcuff removal slot.

Jack has just enough presence of mind not to shout a threat through the door. The toughs - guys who had a reputation for fighting - haven't seen that he's trapped yet.

"Kolitz you son of a bitch," he hisses, and pulls back, tests his range, pulls until he gets the chains taut against each other. He twists as far as he can and then arches his back, braces a foot against the door for leverage, and then the laughter starts behind him and he knows he's got about twenty seconds to break the chain or he's in real trouble.

He hopes John has used the time to get his shit together with Finch and pulls harder, until the bones in his wrists threaten to give, and the chain doesn't. His foot slides and he only just keeps himself from thrashing uselessly then. He doesn't have time to reset himself for enough leverage, so he glances over his shoulder and finds two or three guys just out of range. They're waiting for his guard to lower, for him to panic - but it's a familiar face that catches his eyes.

In one of the isolated yards, a single figure. Not so tall, balding, glasses. _Elias_. He looks impassive when his eyes meet Jack's, not surprised, but Jack can see the anger there - how upset Elias is to have his 'hands' tied. Jack could almost laugh because he's probably about a thousand times more pissed that _his_ are.

He can tell how close the others are behind him by how tightly Elias' fists curl, but he refuses to look away for a second, just waits until someone lunges for him to throw his head back, chains clanking against the slot, and kicks out. He connects with both, but it doesn't do him much good. He's just going to have to hold on as long as he can - and he makes it maybe two minutes by vicious flailing and twisting until the cuffs cut into his forearms before someone connects with the injury in his side and he loses his footing in the shock of pain.

As he's going down the tension on his wrists disappears, but his hands come out through the slot still cuffed and he doesn't hear the fight siren start until after he can't find a direction.


	9. Chapter 9

"Hey boss," he coughs, and shifts - probably the worst part of the bruises was the shitty hospice cot springs jabbing Jack in them no matter which way he turned. Elias takes two pills from a white paper cup and stops by Jack's cot to glare disapprovingly.

"Anthony you idiot," he says, and Jack winces because no one uses that name anymore, it's like being scolded by his mother, but Elias' tone is not completely devoid of sympathy. "I should hit you myself."

Jack tilts his chin up, encouragingly. "Try it, four-eyes." 

He's pretty sure he's not so bad off he couldn't take Elias, but the motion wakes a chorus of aches that makes Jack hope inwardly that Elias doesn't mean the threat.

Elias doesn't hit him, he just looks disapproving and he takes very little care when he sits on the edge of Jack's cot. Jack's smile is hurting his face, and he feels about equally like he' laid out in an intersection and let himself get run over by the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, and the best he has in months.

"Couldn't stay away, boss," Jack says, and swallows the gross taste in his mouth. Probably he was spit on a few times, but he hadn't made any enemies here personal enough yet that he worries they might have pissed on him or anything.

"What are you doing here?" Elias commands, his mind sorting and discarding less likely scenarios. It was unlikely Jack had been up to anything on his own initiative (if only Elias _knew_ ), and he knew better than to not be meticulously careful on his errands for Elias.

"Trouble, Boss," Jack says, and he realizes the irony of him suggesting he's here to rescue Elias when he's the one flat out on his back.

"Oh," Elias says conversationally. "That."

Jack's not sure what planet Elias lives on where if he already knew his life was in danger, he'd even have to _ask_ why Jack was here. He goes quiet, lets his silence do the talking. 

"Alright, I get it," Elias says. "But you'll forgive me for pointing out a couple of flaws-"

Jack makes the effort to lift his arm - more stitches though he had mostly abraded himself on the cuffs - and he drops his hand over Elias' wrist and squeezes until his boss winces. It's the first time they've touched in nearly a year - since Elias had overplayed his bid for the mafia dons in a calculated risk.

Elias looks surprised at the contact, simple and subservient as it is, and then he swallows (a real reaction) and pats Jack's scraped knuckles twice with his cupped hand as a substitute for something deeper, more revealing. And that's all Jack's going to get, he realizes. That even here, in Jail, with no one to possibly see them but the prison physician, Elias is still playing chess.

Jack is sick of chess. He sits halfway up, assessing his own damage as 'nothing he won't survive', and tangles his hand into the front of Elias' pumpkin colored jumper. He pulls - and okay, his ring and pinky fingers feel sluggish and sharply painful, but he gets Elias off-balance, gets him close enough so they are cheek to cheek, and Jack can believe he's real and solid and really there again.

Elias is stiff with disapproval, sitting upright and rigid against his the arm Jack slings around his neck and over the opposite shoulder. 

"What was your plan, kid?" Elias says at last, pushing the back of his hand against Jack's chest insistently, and then lower, against Jack's stitches when Jack doesn't immediately return his space to him. He pushes until Jack has to flinch, and then Jack relents at last. "And when did you get shot?"

That's concern, somewhere under the clinical curiosity.

"I was doing somebody a favor," Jack says, and he settles back on the cot. "It worked out okay." 

"And your plan?"

"Get close enough to do something and then do something," Jack answers.

Elias looks disappointed. 

"I didn't have much time, "Jack defends himself - Elias is talented at making him feel like he has to explain, just with a word, a look. Jack stops himself before he starts sounding like one of Elias' students. "Look, I'm here to help, hate me later."

"I'm glad we had this talk, Anthony," Elias starts sarcastically, ignoring Jack's sharp noise of protest. "I had to call in a pretty big favor even to get us this close."

Jack stops his retort and works that sentence backward to forward. It _was_ odd that they were both in the infirmary at the same time. Elias for his migraine medication - Jack remembered the pills - and Jack because...

"Kolitz is one of ours?" Jack could laugh, except he's still pretty sure he wants to shoot the man. "He couldn't come up with a better way to arrange this?"

But Jack realizes that leaving him utterly helpless - a step that wasn't strictly necessary - wasn't an idea that came from Kolitz. It was a lesson, it came from the top down. A reminder it wasn't Jack's place to move without being told, and he could hit Elias for that, right now. It was too close to the old ways, the ways he had been reminded in the past to never take initiative. Prison _has_ changed Elias. It has started to make him what he had railed against. 

Elias doesn't answer, he just starts to get up, carrying his aura of disappointment like a yoke on his shoulders, and Jack bares his teeth dangerously, pushes the line and lifts his voice in defiance of the unspoken order that they were done talking and he should learn his lesson quietly and fall back in line under his superior's thumb. "John's here, too, boss."

That makes Elias pause, his chin lifting, but Jack doesn't miss the spark that comes into his eyes, the speculative upward turn at the corners of his mouth and _that_ is the worst hurt he's endured today.

"Is that so?"

Anger boils up inside Jack, the same sort that always used to get him into trouble before he could put his head down against Elias' knee and listen to plans for the future that made any fucking sense at all, and he wants to let it out - wants to get up and fling the hospice cot wholesale against the wall and tell his boss - he doesn't know what exactly. That he was just as good as John; that he'd fucked Elias' new project just the night before; that Elias could go fuck himself because he was just the same as what he hated.

"Well, Anthony, that's good news," Elias says pleasantly, and it's the truth - Jack couldn't have gotten even this far alone because Elias doesn't back him up the way John's 'boss' does for John. And as a truth, it cuts him down deep, in a place he hasn't felt pain since he was too little to take care of himself.

'Don't ever let the truth bother you.'

It's the one piece of advice he's ever kept from his father. It had come in a moment of drunken lucidity between the end of one ridiculously expensive bottle of scotch whiskey and the start of another. Jack remembers the glassy-eyed and almost apologetic stare, remembers holding his bruised limbs closer to himself.

'Either make sure nobody knows the truth, or everybody knows it - or make sure it can't hurt you.'

Jack had know what he was talking about and could have killed the man. It was in his plans, but a burst artery had beat him to it when he was 17. He'd waited 20 minutes after his father stopped twitching to call the emergency number. Long after the help-seeking grip of fingers on his ankle had failed and fallen away. 

But here was the man who knew the truth - that Jack's loyalty wasn't for show or for power or for what money or favors Elias could shower on him but for something deeper. For his ability to change the ways that had put him at odds with the family before. Elias knew that Jack was really all of those nasty names he had fought so hard against hearing, wasn't ashamed of it, and wasn't going to let it bend him down to the bottom of the pack where it could be ignored or overwritten with falseties, and Elias was using it to cut him just the same. 

"That ain't my name anymore, boss," Jack says, and Elias had already turned away, but he stops, and breathes out, Jack can see the motion roll through his shoulders like a great cat.

"Do you know the myth of Proteus?" Elias asks quietly, and it quiets Jack a little, because the teaching tone is familiar, even if it feels condescending. "You can't even change your shape - do that before you try and change your name."

With that reprimand, Elias is gone, leaving his subordinate stung, quieted. Jack didn't know what shape Elias wanted him in, exactly, but he had his suspicions the transformation metaphorically involved a suit.


End file.
